Website Taxonomy: How to Optimize Your URLs. If you’re a beginner in the SEO industry, you may have heard the term website taxonomy or URL taxonomy.

There are many variations of this phrase and it may be confusing if you’re just starting out in SEO.

Having a well-optimized website taxonomy is critical for having a scalable SEO plan.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What website/URL taxonomy is.
• How URL taxonomy affects site architecture (and hot garbage).
• How Google uses URL taxonomies.
• How to optimize your URL taxonomy.

What Is Website Taxonomy?

Website taxonomy, often called URL taxonomy, refers to how your pages are structured into content silos.

This is dictated by how you set up the subfolders in your URLs.

Before we dive into URL taxonomies, it’s important to understand the structure of a URL.

In the example URL below take a look at the last two pieces (subfolder and slug).

Those are going to be what we’re looking at in this article.

Whenever you create a new page, the name of the page is the slug.

Whenever you assign a parent page, your new page becomes the child page and has the parent page as the subfolder in the URL.

When creating the different sections of your website, it’s important to reflect the name of the sections in the URL.

Note that in this example, the section of the site that the URL belongs to is “services.”

So other pages in that category may be:

• https://www.examplehealthsite.com/services/therapy
• https://www.examplehealthsite.com/services/group-therapy
• https://www.examplehealthsite.com/services/tms

How URL Taxonomy Affects Site Architecture

URL taxonomy plays a critical role in your site’s architecture.

Creating clean URLs that follow a scalable structure allows you to have a more crawlable site architecture.

Check out the example below.

On this website, they have great examples of good URL taxonomy and bad URL taxonomy.

This is example comes from Screaming Frog’s Force-Directed Directory Tree Diagram.

It takes all of the URLs on a website and organized them based on their URL taxonomy.

Read more: searchenginejournal